Champions of a Cause: American Librarians and the Library Bill of Rights in the 1950s

THELIBRARYPROFESSION’S UNL)ERSTANDIK\‘Gof the Library Bill of Rights-and, in fact, American librarianship’s understanding of itself-is a product of both contemporary political discourse and of the American Library Association’s pragmatic responses to censorship challenges in the 1950s. Between the 1948 adoption of the strengthened Library Bill of Rights and 1960, ALA based its “library faith” on a foundation of pluralist democracy and used social scientific “objectivity” to try to fend off challenges to itsjurisdiction. When the McCarthy Era brought challenges to the very premises of pluralist democracy, however, librarians responded by becoming “champions of the cause” of intellectual freedom. Over the last half-century, the Library Bill of Rights evolved out of changes in the political, social, and cultural climate and thinking and out of changes in the roles of libraries and librarians. Tensions manifest in its implementation, ably pointed out by Baldwin in his article in this issue of Library Trends, spring in large measure, from its origin and early years, from the pragmatic nature of its development, and from the contradictions inherent in librarians’ roles as selectors from, and collectors of, the cultural record. The events and attitudes of the 1950swere crucial to the formation and interpretation of the Library Bill of Rights and help account for its contradictions. The Library’s Bill of Rights, the document’s first manifestation, was adopted in 1939by the Council of the American Library Association (ALA) at a time when Hitler’s advance across Europe spurred many Americans Louise S. Robbins, School of Library and Information Studies, Helen C. White Hall, 600 N. Park Street, University of WJisconsin, Madison, WI .is706 LIBRARYTRENDS, Vol. 45, No. 1,Summer 1996, pp. 28-49 01996 The Board of Trustees, University of Illinois ROBBINS/CHAMPIONS OF A CAUSE 29 into a spirited and uncritical defense of democracy. The context of its adoption can perhaps best be illustrated by excerpts from the writings of two influential thinkers of the time. The first, social scientist Bernard Berelson (1938), called on librarians to abandon their “myth” of impartiality. Reminding librarians that “the library, as an institution, is not impartial between, let us say, education and non-education, or knowledge and ignorance” (p.88),he insisted that the library should not be impartial “between democracy and dictatorship, or between intelligence and stupidity or prejudice, or between the general public welfare and special interests” (p. 88). He urged librarians to “take education for democracy to the people” in order to bring “America’s social thinking up to date” (p.89). To do this, Berelson asserted, “librarianship must stand firmly against social and political and economic censorship of book collections; it must be so organized that it can present effective opposition to this censorship and it must protect librarians who are threatened by it” (p. 89). Another influential thinker of the time, Archibald MacLeish, poet, lawyer and, from 1939 to 1945, Librarian of Congress, told librarians they had difficulty achieving professional status because they could not reach agreement on the “social end which librarianship exists to serve” (MacLeish, 1940, p. 385) . A profession must be so essential to society’s welfare, he said, “that it requires of necessity a discipline, a technique, and even an ethic of its own” (p. 385). The worldwide attack upon democracy by fascism, MacLeish suggested, forced librarians to examine how their purpose related to the idea of democracy, to the idea of a government in which an informed electorate makes the decisions. He then described the social end of librarianship: To subject the record of experience to intelligent control so that all parts of that record shall be somewhere deposited; to bring to the servicingof that record the greatest learning and the most responsible intelligence the country can provide; to make available the relevant parts of that record to those who have need of it at the time they have need of it and in a form responsive to their need. (p. 422) Attempting these tasks, MacLeish proclaimed, would not only serve the cause of democracy, but it would, in the process, also help librarianship find its long-sought-after social function-“a function as noble as any men have ever served” (p. 422). Librarians were to use their expertise in the selection, organization, and provision of information in the service of freedom (Geller, 1984, p. 178; Winter, 1988, p. 72). These statements provide the context for an understanding of the Library Bill of Rights as it later developed and reveal its sometimes contradictory dual purposes to which Baldwin rightly refers-i.e., to define and defend librarianship as a profession and to defend the traditional values of pluralist democracy, especially intellectual freedom. Library Historian Michael Harris (1986) has asserted, furthermore, that librarians 30 LIBRARY TRENDS/SUMMER 1996 have been obsessed with their lack of professional status and that American librarians have been-in spite of their claims of “objectivity” or assertions of supporting intellectual freedom-uncritical (and largely unconscious) instruments of hegemony. They have, he asserts, embraced and inculcated dominant cultural values which maintain the status quo and ignore differences of race and class. This examination of the development of the Library Bill of Rights in the 1950s probes the extent to which it reflected prevailing political discourse. The essay also describes the pragmatic nature of the development of the Library Bill of Rights in reaction to external threats to librarians’ professional jurisdiction. A combination of three events frame the decade: on the one hand, the June 1948 adoption of the strengthened Library Bill of Rights and, on the other, the publication of two defining works in ALA’s intellectual freedom history-Marjorie Fiske’s (1959) Book Selection and Censorship: A Study of School and Public Libraries in Calijornia and Robert B. Downs’s (1960) The First Freedom: Liberty and Justice in the World of Books and Reading In briefly recapping the intervening events, the essay highlights challenges to intellectual freedom deemed important to ALA’s leaders and their responses as they tried to move the fledgling Library Bill of Rights from theory to practice during the height of